Khronos Group press conference at GDC about Vulkan

[mvitkun]

Khronos Group released a PDF version of a presentation, via the tweet of the EA presenter, supposedly scheduled for the 15th of this month.

 

The above is the basic post, you can go to the source if you want but I'll include brief summaries of the topics covered by the six speakers for those who don't care to look through the lengthy PDF.

 

The presentation starts off fairly tame, they just clarify what Vulkan is, how it came to be, what other projects contributed to it, etc.

This part is led by somebody from EA. (all names in presentation)

They hand it off to the next speaker from Valve.

He details the benefits of Vulkan, as well as the extra work that these benefit will require on the developer side.

He introduces how scheduling will work in Vulkan.

And he finishes off with announcing that Valve's Intel/Linux driver will be open sourced, and that Source 2 supports the Vulkan Alpha as of this day (not known whether it means the 15th or now.

There's also an empty slide titled "Demo" without anything on it, hopefully somebody will write about it when the presentation takes place.

 

He then passes the torch to the next speaker from Oxide Games.

He talks mostly about how CPU and GPU utilization is improved and then has a screenshot demonstrating these improvements by implementing the ideas into a mantle build.

The first slide is marked inspirational video but again is empty.

He mentions how CPU improvements are coming not from better single threaded performance but higher core count and says that because of this software must scale well in multi-core cpus.

He finishes by detailing how the Vulkan API will fix lack of cpu usage in vs how current APIs handle it- rather than having no usage it'll assign other jobs to it-.

 

The next speaker was from Unreal (Engine).

He talked mainly about what the code will look like and what kinds of commands will be at your (a developers) disposal.

 

The speaker that followed was from Unity and talked about Vulkan's shader library, SPIR-V, and general compiling.

 

A different speaker from Valve comes on stage and talks about the different layers of the Vulkan API, with the first and last layers, the application and the drive, being required and the the inclusion of the middle layers being up to the developers.

 Validation

 Reference Counting

 Performance Linting

 Debug

 Thread Safety

 Trace Capture & Replay

He explains that there are two types of layers; Active layers -layers requested by the application-  and Passive layers -layers injected by third party (i.e. Steam,Fraps, Rivatuner stat server). He then goes on to say that a layer can be either open source or proprietary.

He talks about the SDK; what it includes, and what each of the included things are.

The loader - You can either use the default loader or create a private/proprietary one to avoid common problems such as those with opengl32.dll.

The Header/build scripts.

And official layers mentioned above.

There's also a few more things included such as scripts used to debug by generating trivial layers, valve's open source Intel/linux driver, and the GLSL->SPIR-V compiler.

In closing he mentioned a 3rd party debugger developed in parallel with Vulkan, GLAVE, which is to Vulkan as VOGL was to OpenGL.

There's another slide marked "Performance Demo" but as in the other two instances it is empty.

[werto165]

With great power.... more developer responsibility AHhhhhh... ubisoft I'm scared. 

[Manny Calavera]

With great power.... more developer responsibility AHhhhhh... ubisoft I'm scared. 

 

NO MORE HALF FINISHED GAMES WOOHOOO

 

now only 25% finished games. a good reason to boycott lazy dev.

[FakezZ]

Soo we can hope for Battlefield 5 to use Vulkan? So maybe linux support, or am I pushing it?

[Lays]

I'm only posting here coz you said everyone was ignoring it

[mvitkun]

I'm only posting here coz you said everyone was ignoring it

I appreciate that, maybe while it's at the top for a few seconds a few more people will notice.

[Trik'Stari]

-snip

Even I find that to be a bit of a stretch.

[LePawel]

Now let's see who's gonna actually implement that... because unless unity makes it the primary API, 95% of games will still be the same not texture physics simulators we have now.

[mvitkun]

Now let's see who's gonna actually implement that... because unless unity makes it the primary API, 95% of games will still be the same not texture physics simulators we have now.

Well there's Source 2 by Valve, there's Unreal Engine by Epic Games, and there's Unity.

There will also likely be support on the Frostbite Engine since EA was one of the presenters.

Below are companies collaborating with them to make Vulkan happen.......most of those names are pretty big if I do say so myself.